Thursday, 11 August 2016

'Love Wins' - LGBT Relationships and Christianity

There have been all
sorts of fascinating stories from the Olympics so far. However, I was struck
particularly by a brief BBC report about one of those quirky stories that often
bring a bit of leaven to the over-the-top medal fest.

It concerned a
volunteer at the Games who proposed marriage to her partner, a Brazilian Rugby
Sevens player. As the BBC reported, in the wake of the medal ceremony
for Australia's victorious Sevens team, Games volunteer Marjorie Enya
entered the pitch and asked Brazil
player Isadora Cerullo to marry her. Enya said, "I know
rugby people are amazing and they would embrace it. The Olympic Games can look
like closure but, for me, it's starting a new life with someone. I wanted
to show people that love wins."

The report took
Enya’s words “Love Wins” as its title, and the reporter said, “I think I have
something behind my contact lens.”

The phrase, ‘Love Wins’
has become something of a refrain from within the LGBT* community, a way of
acknowledging the centrality of love in our faithful commitments. As the
International Business Times of 26th June 2015 acknowledged, it’s
become one of the most shared hashtags ever, its use prompted not least by the
increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage.

I’ve been thinking
about how the phrase plays out in Christian contexts, especially more
conservative Evangelical ones.

For surely all
Christians, whether we be of Evangelical or Liberal hue, are inclined to say –
at a deep level – ‘Love Wins’. That is, that God is definitive for ‘the World’
(in the Kantian sense of ‘the World’) and God is Love. The mark of that Love
and its very fulfilment is Jesus Christ.

So what kind of
response might a Christian make to something like the story of Cerullo and
Enya, or any other person – gay or straight – who holds up an LGBT relationship
as an example of ‘Love Wins’?

From a broadly
liberal and/or radical perspective it’s obviously not that tricky to take the
example of a committed gay relationship as an example of Love. A pretty ready
narrative is available to account for it. Those relationships, just like
straight ones, can embody love in erotic, sacrificial, friendship and
intellectual senses. From my own perspective, it strikes me as hardly offensive
or problematic to talk of a committed gay relationship as potentially an
example of Love, of God’s work of redeeming the World.

From a more
conservative perspective I’m guessing there might be a number of responses to
claims that LGBT relationships demonstrate God’s redeeming love.

One strategy is to
claim that a relationship like Cerullo and Enya’s demonstrates a failure of
Love. That it’s not Love at all. It’s pure sin or wickedness.

That is an option. But
that can hardly be an attractive conclusion for most conservative Christians.

For that would be
for a Christian to position him or herself as lacking comprehension of some of
the meanings of the term ‘love’. It’s to risk looking ridiculous. For, many
people (even people who might be a wee bit skeptical about, e.g., gay marriage)
would be inclined to respond, ‘Well, this couple or that couple actually look
as committed as straight couples and have shown their faithfulness over time. They
have given themselves to each other in their relationship. Surely that’s one of
the things we mean by ‘love’.”

Of course, some
Christians might be happy to be seen as ‘odd’ on the matter of Love. They have
no need to be credible or understood by non-Christians or the wider world, for their
sense of justification will come from being ‘separate’; from understanding
themselves as, for example, a ‘faithful remnant’ who hold to ‘God’s truth’. The
sense of being at odds with the world will only make that sense of
justification seem stronger. (In the way that one suspects some evangelistic groups
like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormon missionaries ‘evangelise’ not so much to
convert as to use the constant rebuffs as a way to confirm their ‘chosenness’.)

I suppose a strategy
available to those who wish to indicate that committed LGBT relationships cannot
exemplify the Love at the heart of God is to simply claim that the reason they’re
not ‘loving’ is as a result of divine command or fiat.

In other words,
that it is a matter of God’s command, structured through a focus of authority
(a holy book or the command of the institution or an authority figure, or
combinations of all three).

This approach will
be powerful for some people. Obedience to God is a potent motivator for the
religious mind (though how that plays out in practice is a kind of precis of
Christian history). It enables the critic of LGBT relations to say, ‘Well, yes,
I can see that you are in a relationship, and indeed that you are committed
and, hey, I might even be able to admit that you have some love going on’, but
this is not what God (who after all is the ultimate arbiter of everything)
wants, likes or expects.’

And when someone
asks why God’s got such a downer on LGBT relations, the response (in essence)
is, ‘Well, that’s not what God’s plan is for us. Sorry, but it’s not.’ And
people will start talking about the ‘nature’ of men and women and God’s plan
for that ‘divine order’ and the whole thing goes around and around.

One of the issues
with the ‘command and control’ picture of God is that practically no one buys
it as a ‘whole package’, even those who are tempted to. When people say, ‘This
is what God says, we all just need to get with the programme,’ it strikes me they’ve
already committed to a work of hermeneutics; at least I hope so, unless the
Bible, Koran, other Holy Book etc. operate as step-by-step Haynes Manuals.But, in the case of the Bible at least, to
treat it as a series of commands or categorical propositions seems to be willfully
ignorant of its composition and complexity. The nearest we get to the pure
command is ‘Love God etc and love your neighbour as yourself.’ But even that is
subject to hermeneutic work. It does not read itself. It is contextualized in
other texts, lives and contexts. That’s not to say that theology isn’t involved
in robust analysis and synthesis but is a profound hermeneutic work.

So perhaps another
route is to say that a committed gay relationship has a ‘bit of love’ but isn’t
a full expression of God’s love. That is, that, while it might embody a bit of
love, it falls short of what love looks like at its fullest in human
relationships.

This seems to offer
a more fruitful route for the conservative Christian. For, the strategy sets up
space for the conservative Christian to claim that gay relationships – even if
they actually can partially represent the love at the heart of the universe –
aren’t properly loving. And one answer to what is meant by ‘properly loving’
would be for them to be ‘fruitful’ – i.e. ‘generate children and thereby embody
love in and through new relationships’.

There is a logic
here. However, I suspect that there are more questions raised than answered.

Firstly, arguably, the
‘hetero relations embody God’s love because they’re potentially fruitful’ view
is (to be crude) ‘ a bit unChristian’. That is, there are reasons for thinking it
ignores the Pauline view in the Bible. For, Paul seems to be more interested in
what we might broadly call ‘celibacy’ and on singlehearted focus on God as the
route to loving fruitfulness, rather than on older (Jewish) ideas of
fruitfulness through family and fecundity.

Even if that’s a
crude take on what’s going on in the Bible, then some elements of Paul at least
offers reasons for saying that the fullness of love is not to be found in any human
sexual relationship – hetero or otherwise. The locus of love is God alone and
our devotion to him. Any kind of sexual relationship is a falling short of God’s
plan.

But, let’s suppose
that the potential bodily fruitfulness/fecundity of hetero relationships is
majored on as iconic of love. That feels barely credible in a post-modern
society where both hetero and gay people access IVF and have a range of options
for ‘fruitfulness’. Our concepts of ‘natural’ have been bust open by science.
(Though, if memory serves, Hume offered a devastating analysis in the 18th
century of the use of the term ‘natural’ in discourse. Criticism of the term is
hardly recent.)

It’s also
potentially insulting to the extraordinary range of ‘fruitfulness’ on offer in
human relations. It runs the risk of idealizing particular structures of ‘family’
that are as potentially damaging as they can be life-giving. (Most abuse
happens, for example, within family relations.)

In short, there is
a credibility gap for those who might wish to deploy a version of what might be
called ‘natural theology’ – the claim to discern God’s will in the ordering of
the ‘natural’ world. Philosophically terms like ‘natural’ or ‘fruitfulness’ are
non-neutral terms and belong to complex, power-laden language.

At a practical
level, the claim that ‘God just says LGBT love is a rubbish and sinful version
of love and therefore desist from calling it love’ has about as much
credibility in the UK’s wider public narrative as claiming that God made the
universe in six earth days.

Credibility does
matter. Christians of all sorts of hues wish to make truth claims and also
accept that some of those claims may be treated with incredulity. Yet, for
those who wish to participate in the public square and also to be involved in
proclaiming good news of God’s love there is a desire to make rich connections
with the wider world.

Love is one of the
most potent words in the language. One doesn’t need to be a person of faith to
have practical, living embodied experience of love. Indeed, insofar as
Christians wish to call non-Christians into a deeper relationship with the God
of love that call is predicated on a continuity in comprehension. I.e. when we
talk of love in setting A it has ‘connective tissue’ with talk of love in setting
B. The Christian wishes to say that God’s love connects with human love and
vice versa, but if I’m going to speak of ‘God’s love’ to non-Christians with
any kind of authenticity or value my use of ‘God’s love’ needs some family
resemblance with locutions of love in wider settings.

So, to return to ‘Love Wins’ and the story of Enya and Cerullo. I guess Christians have a choice. To
discern love active in relationships like theirs and celebrate them, or say ‘No,
that’s not love’ or ‘It’s a rubbish version of it.’

It must be awful to
be left in a situation where one says (feels one has to say), ‘No, these
relationships are a bit rubbish or they’re just sinful’. Because that is to be
left in a situation where one feels ‘left behind’ by rich understandings of
terms like ‘love’ and ‘grace’ and ‘joy’. It’s to be left in a situation where
one’s treasured narratives about grace and love have been exposed as wanting.
No one wants to see themselves as the baddie, but that’s what our new world of
acceptance has done to a group of people who want to see themselves as ‘loving’
and ‘gracious’.

Maybe I’m wrong,
but I think this is what has happened to the conservative Christian position. Non-religious
and, frankly, most religious people in our society have looked around and seen
that love is not a thing which evaporates when x or y commit to a non-hetero
relationship. They’ve judged the claims of the conservative Christian for
themselves and, for the most part, say, ‘Nah, we think we know what ‘Love Wins’ looks like
and the conservative Christian position isn’t an example of it.’

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Let's not confuse "Love" with "sex". We as Christians are called to Love all people, regardless. But loving them does not mean we are also called to have "sex" with all people. It is totally within the Christian perspective that a man can love a man and a woman can love a woman, but that does not mean that it is OK for them to copulate. And just because you can twist nature, does not always mean you should. We have the technology to wipe out all living things on the planet, but that doesn't mean that we should consider doing it - and that's just one ridiculously exagerated example of what I mean.